


Bought By Judgment of the Eye

by doctormchotson



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Arthur with a camera, Established Relationship, M/M, Merlin's sexy and he knows it, Modern Era, Not Beta Read, non-explicit sexy times
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-06
Updated: 2014-05-06
Packaged: 2018-01-23 17:32:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1573922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctormchotson/pseuds/doctormchotson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur's friends don't seem to understand just how gorgeous Merlin truly is. He attempts to remedy this with photographic evidence of Merlin's attractiveness. </p>
<p>He fails.<br/>Merlin does not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bought By Judgment of the Eye

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Shakespeare's _Love's Labours Lost_

"Explain to me again why you're accosting me with your camera?" Merlin grumbled and hunched his shoulders until they were up by his ears, completely ruining the shot Arthur had just lined up. Arthur huffed and scowled, never bringing his face down from the camera. 

"I'm not accosting you with the camera, _Mer_ lin. I've told you, I need to get an actual quality photo of you when you're not making a stupid face or in the midst of tripping over your own feet." 

Merlin scowled, again ruining an otherwise perfectly lovely photo, with the sunlight through the trees of Hyde Park framing his completely ridiculous hair like a halo. Where he might have looked sweet, angelic even, he now looked like a toddler in the middle of a huff. 

"But why do you suddenly have dire need of a good photo of me, exactly? Which isn't possible, by the way. I'm completely incapable of not looking like a buffoon in front of a camera," Merlin replied, turning just as Arthur was going to snap another photo, thereby blurring his features irreparably. Arthur sighed, considered prevaricating, and then decided there was nothing for it but honesty. 

"Because, _Mer_ lin, it just so happens that I think you're the most gorgeous person I've ever seen in my life and the idiots I have deigned to call friends are completely oblivious to your sex appeal. As this obviously must be remedied, I can't have them thinking I've fallen in love with a troll," Arthur shuddered indelicately at the memory of _that_ failure of his father's dating life, "I need a nice photo of you so I can prove to them they don't know what they're missing."

At that, Arthur thrust his chin forward pugnaciously and attempted to glare Merlin into silence with the sheer force of his regal brow. Merlin stared at him with a mixture of incredulity, and the kind of amused affection that typically came over his features whenever Arthur said something perfectly reasonable that Merlin deigned somehow silly.

Merlin arched a brow and said, "So...you want to get a picture of me looking sexy, so your friends don't think you're dating below your station, is that it?"

Arthur spluttered a bit. "No! No, of course that's not it! None of them - They - Look, they all love you. Sometimes I think they like you better than they like me. And everyone knows Gwaine was a bit miffed about me asking you out before he did, at least until he and Perce got together. So no, it's not that I'm...'dating below my station' it's just..." 

Arthur sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. 

"All Leon and Lance and most of the rest of them see when they look at you is your gangly limbs and goofy smile and the magic you can perform with a computer. But when I look at you..." 

He looked up at Merlin then, helpless, and utterly unable to put into words exactly how goddamn crazy he was about each and every part of the man in front of him.

Merlin smiled softly and stepped forward, hands framing Arthur's face, and brought their foreheads together. "Yeah," he whispered, "me too." 

Arthur hummed happily, tension leeching from his shoulders, and wrapped his arms loosely around Merlin's waist, careful to keep the camera from digging into Merlin's hip. Which, of course, was when Merlin completely ruined the moment by nibbling Arthur's nose, complete with "nomnom" sound effects. 

"Oh my god," Arthur gasped out, laughing, "what is _wrong_ with you?"

Merlin giggled, ruffled Arthur's hair out of it's perfect styling, and then took off across the park, laughing at Arthur's joyful swearing as he took chase.

  


\---------------------------

  


"You can NOT be serious." 

The man stretched out before him on their worn leather couch looked up at him incredulously, completely destroying any "absentminded and extremely long-legged professor" look Arthur may or may not have been attempting to capture with the camera poised at his face.

"Of course I'm serious, Merlin. I'm always serious."

Arthur continued to click away, moving about their living room, deciding that maybe if he just took a high volume of pictures one of them might not turn out for shite. Which would be more likely if Merlin wouldn't guffaw in quite such an endearing yet undeniably silly looking manner.

"You actually think I look sexy like _this_?" Merlin gasps out between laughs. "I literally have the worst posture on Earth. I'm in SWEATPANTS. No one thinks I look sexy right now."

Arthur frowned, threw himself down into his armchair, and snapped out, "Well, I do," feeling grumpy and wrong footed in a way he wasn't used to.

Merlin pulled his feet up, wrapped his arms around his shins, rested his chin on his knees and gave Arthur a considering look. After a long moment of rather more thoughtful regard than Arthur was used to, Merlin smirked and unfolded himself.

"I'm no expert, but, I think you might, possibly, be looking at this the wrong way."

Arthur grunted in response, fiddling with the camera in irritation, when Merlin, in the kind of fluid movement that shouldn't have been possible for such an uncoordinated man, slid his knees onto the armchair cushion on either side of Arthur's hips, and gently tugged the camera from his now lax grasp. 

"Since absolutely NO ONE could think I was sexy looking like a particularly lazy hobo, I'm beginning to think that if you want to show the world what a sexy beast I am, you might consider photographs of _yourself_ ," Merlin smirked, and snapped a quick photo of Arthur as he stared up at the slender vision poised above him. 

He fiddled with some of the settings on the camera and continued with, "Or maybe, what I _do to you_."

Merlin placed the camera on a side table, stretching a bit to keep his knees on the cushion, and tweaked it's position a bit before turning back to Arthur. He threaded his fingers in Arthur's hair, ground his hips down in a slow, sensual roll, and at the apex of the movement, took Arthur's lower lip between his teeth and tugged.

With a helpless moan, Arthur gripped Merlin's hips and tugged the slimmer man as tightly to him as he could, and simply rode the wave of sensation Merlin was putting him through. 

The assault was relentless; delicate nips to his ears, heady licks into his mouth, almost painful bites to his pulse point followed by soothing licks and bruising sucks. At one point Arthur gave a concerted effort to launch a counterattack, laving attention on Merlin's sensitive nipples, but eventually he was forced to admit defeat. He threw back his head, arched his back into a particularly excellent roll of Merlin's hips that ground their erections together _perfectly_ , and moaned, hands spasming on Merlin's skin. 

There was a clatter of something on the side table, but when Merlin licked his way up Arthur's chest and neck and across his jaw to thrust his tongue back into his mouth, Arthur couldn't find it within himself to care about anything but the blinding pleasure this impossible, infuriating man was wringing from his body.

  


\---------------------------

  


Arthur woke up late the next morning, tangled in the sheets, alone in the bed, with a sticky note in Merlin's hurried scrawl clinging to his forehead. 

> _Check your email_

With a great yawn he stretched, pointing his feet and curling his toes for good measure, before rolling off the bed and dropping into 25 pushups, flopping onto his chest after the last. He reached up and flailed blindly on his side table until his found his mobile and dragged it down, rolling onto his back and flicking at the screen. Opening his email, he found the message Merlin was talking about.

> Subject: [No Subject]  
>  From: memrys@gmail.com 
> 
> You know that mission to prove to the world how sexy I am?  
>  Think one of these should do the trick. 
> 
> -M 

Arthur smirked, and tapped on the folder of pictures attached to the email to start the download, flinging himself up off the floor on one fluid movement. He went to get dressed while the folder downloaded, checking the mobile every so often as he went.

He was in the middle of brushing his teeth when the download finally completed, and he almost choked on toothpaste when he tapped the little icon. Sitting there on his phone, innocent as can be, were picture after picture of he and Merlin on the armchair the night before. They were all framed perfectly, so that they were both silhouetted and visible from the waist up, back lit by the kitchen light. And they were all downright filthy; Merlin sucking a hickey on Arthur's neck, Merlin arched against Arthur's chest while Arthur nibbled Merlin's nipple through his shirt, Merlin biting Arthur's lip and tugging, Merlin with his hands buried in Arthur's hair and his tongue lewdly thrust in Arthur's mouth. 

But none of them held a candle to the last photo in the folder. 

Merlin's hips, with Arthur's hands clenched bruisingly tight to them, were obviously in the middle of rolling obscenely against Arthur's, Merlin's far hand was fisted in Arthur's shirt, and Arthur's head was tipped back, neck exposed, eyes closed and mouth parted in a moan so obvious it was nearly audible. Merlin was reaching toward the camera with his other hand, and he was staring directly into the camera, head tipped down so he was looking up through his lashes, eyes dark and pupils blown, hair wild as a summer storm, with a self-satisfied smirk dancing across his kiss-swollen lips. 

Arthur stood staring at his phone for a long minute, brain completely short circuited, until he came back online with a splutter and a groan. He palmed his rock hard cock, and thunked his head into the bathroom mirror. As he rubbed his thumb along his length through his trousers, he came to a decision and composed a text. 

> To: Merlin  
>  Checked email. Mission "Show the World How Sexy Merlin Is" terminated in the interest of national security. 

After hitting "send," reopening the photo, whimpering into his fist and rolling his hips into the bathroom counter, he composed another text. 

> To: Merlin  
>  Come home. Now, Merlin. 

He spat out the toothpaste, and rinsed his mouth. After another glance at the photo, he closed his eyes, opened his mouth in a breathy groan, and was just about to free himself from the confines of his trousers, when his mobile chimed with an incoming text message. 

> From: Merlin  
>  10 minutes. Don't bring yourself off yet. This time I want video. ;)

Arthur threw back his head, let out a sound somewhere between a growl of frustration and a lustful bellow, gripped himself, and decided that it was definitely, absolutely, positively a very very good thing that no one but he knew just how much of a sexy bastard Merlin truly was.

**Author's Note:**

> That was the closest to a sex scene I have ever written. I actually wrote the word "cock" and that makes me feel really really awkward omg pleasebenice *scurries away*
> 
> Unbeta'd so all mistakes are my own.
> 
> As always, comments, critiques, kudos, etc. are hugged, snuggled, and, if they're lucky, passionately made out with.


End file.
